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The Dreamsnatcher Blog Tour

Today, I could not be more thrilled to welcome Abi Elphinstone to my blog. Abi's debut book, The Dreamsnatcher, is an amazing adventure story and was published yesterday. It is a brilliant book and I can't recommend it enough. The main character Moll has a very special friend; over to Abi to explain...

The Only Animal That
Can’t Be Tamed…

Although
Moll is an orphan, she has a lot of people looking out for her back in camp:
Oak and Mooshie, Sid, Cinderella Bull and even Hard-Times Bob. But it’s the
wildcat from the northern wilderness that perhaps looks after Moll the most.
Whether she’s trespassing into the Deepwood to get her cob back or racing over
the heath away from Skull, Gryff is never far from Moll’s side.

Gryff - hunting for food in the winter

It’s
funny to think that when I wrote a very early draft of The Dreamsnatcher, Moll’s animal companion started out as an owl
called Cobweb! He was a cute little tawny owl who could swivel his head full
circle and do a shuffly backwards moonwalk, but as the story developed, I
realised I wanted a wilder animal – one who could race through the forest by
Moll’s side and protect her if danger lurked close. At first, I wanted that
animal to be a snow leopard, one of the most secretive wild animals in the
world – and one I fell in love with after reading Jackie Morris’ The Snow Leopard. But I needed my story
to be believable and although I never say where The Dreamsnatcher is set, in my mind it’s in the New Forest in
England – and there aren’t any snow leopards there, that’s for sure…

The Snow Leopard in Jackie Morris’ book

I
grew up in Scotland and I remember glimpsing a wildcat once in a wood on the
moors and my father saying how rare they were (they are currently a critically
endangered species with an estimated 35 left in the wild in the UK) and how
they were ‘the only animal that can’t be tamed.’ Moll is about as feral as kids
come so a wildcat seemed a fitting sidekick for her – and in my head I could
imagine one coming down from the ‘northern wilderness’ to the ‘southern parts
of the country’ to protect Moll. It then took me ages to come up with a name
for my wildcat and after weeks of thinking, I sent this email to my husband,
Edo: ‘Which of these names do you think is the best name for
a wildcat? Silver, Skylar, Fly, Pace, Grey, Bry. The wildcat is solitary,
intelligent, fiercely protective, stealthy... And it's male.’ Edo replied: ‘None
of those. I like Gryff.’ As soon as I heard it, I knew Gryff was perfect – the
name even sounded like a growl he might make.

Gryff looking over to check up on Moll

It
was a freezing day in January when I went to watch the wildcats in captivity at
the New Forest wildlife park. But I sat shivering in the snow before their huge
cages, watching them sleep, eat, stretch and slink around their territory. I
listened to their greeting call and watched them leap, like ripples of silk,
from the tallest branches to the ground. The wildcats’ warning growls sent
shivers down my spine and watching them rip apart meat with razor-sharp claws
made me understand that Gryff, although a friend to Moll, would have to be wild
at heart. And after seeing all this, Gryff went from being a page on Wikipedia
to a fully-drawn character.

Me holding baby Gryff (I found him in Burma!)

Gryff
is large, even for a wildcat, with a muscular body and long, banded legs. His
coat is thick and grey with jet-black stripes and his tail is long and bushy,
ringed with bands of black and ending in a blunt tip. His eyes are large and
bright yellow/green (a bit like Moll’s but with vertical black pupils) and he
has white whiskers and sharp claws on all four limbs. Usually he sleeps inside
hollowed trees, beneath fallen branches, inside rocky cracks or in the
abandoned nests of other large animals like foxes or badgers. But because
Skull’s dark magic is growing stronger, Gryff starts to sleep beneath Moll’s
wagon so that he can guard her at night. Gryff hunts at dawn or dusk,
patrolling forest glades and woodland areas and he can leap from the highest branches
of trees to the ground unscathed when hunting other animals. He uses his
camouflage and patience to stalk as close possible to his prey before reaching
a full speed sprint and catching it. He crouches on alder branches overhanging
the river when he’s after a duck, he waits above rabbit warrens for rabbits to
emerge and he kills by grabbing the prey in his claws, piercing the neck with
his fangs, then consuming almost every part of the kill. Gryff’s night vision is seven times
better than our own and his hearing is active 24 hours a day, even when he’s
sleeping. He can detect minute changes in air currents with his whiskers
movement, he can smell meat 200 metres away and in sprints he can reach up to 30
miles per hour!

Gryff hunting in the mountains

Gryff
is powerful, agile, intelligent, fearless, loyal and patient and although he is
by nature a solitary animal full of secrets, he forms an extraordinary bond
with Moll and she learns to read his movements…

·Whiskers twitching: he’s heard something

·Ears
swivelling: he’s listening for something

·Ears
flattened to his head: he’s scared

·Tail
down low: he’s seen something

·Stamping
forelimbs: he’s angry

…
and his noises…

·Brrroooooo: his greeting call (like a
dynamo throbbing deep in the earth)

The story of Lizzie Borden has a whiff of folklore about it, it feels hazy to me, apocryphal perhaps, something half known and uncertain like Washington and the cherry tree or the ride of Paul Revere. Shamefully, I had to Google both the latter two examples to double check they were the events I thought I was referring to. I choose them deliberately though - is it my Englishness that makes these events fuzzy to me? Do these stories live in the American psyche the way Magna Carta, Henry VIII and his six wives, and Jack the Ripper (to select three almost at random) live in mine?
I remember a book we stocked when I was a very young bookseller at Waterstones in Watford that looked at the psychology of children who murder their parents. The copy on the back of the book talked of Lizzie Borden. I remember half wondering about the case, then shelving the book away and moving onto the next armful. But it stuck in my m…

My nieces and nephews and I have a monthly book club, called Book Chase (although it sometimes gains an extra 's' to become Book Chasse). The rules are simple: we all bring something we've read during the last month, talk about it to each other, and eat snacks. We live tweet each meeting with the hashtag BookChase. Sometimes, when we remember, we Storify all the tweets too. This month, we remembered!